Short Film Turns Internet Images into the Apocalypse

Feel the doom in Thomas Traum's found image animation.

A red laser rips through the visual fabric of the internet—that's the idea behind this experimental animation from Thomas Traum. Titled Texture, the short's visuals are "scraped off Tumblrs and news websites" and reformed for the animation so it becomes a distorted looking glass of the media we devour on a daily basis. Recognizible forms—cats, a human face—appear out of the digital ether as the laser tears onwards.

To source the images from the vast pool of data out there, Traum created custom software that scanned the internet and downloaded images over the period of a week. He and his team then hand-picked what to use. "These images form a reflection of what images are posted and consumed online," he notes. "The laser functions as a scanner, like a needle of a record player, scanning the surface, analysing and transforming it into sound." The next stage of the project is to create a version that ingests and modifies the images in real-time.